tag:blog.lunchroulette.us,2014:/feedLunch Roulette2017-10-24T11:27:31-07:00Lunch Roulettehttp://blog.lunchroulette.usSvbtle.comtag:blog.lunchroulette.us,2014:Post/lunch-or-cigarettes2017-10-24T11:27:31-07:002017-10-24T11:27:31-07:00Lunch or Cigarettes?<p>Er.</p>
<p>I’ll have lunch please.</p>
<p>It’s not often you get to start a blog post paying homage to the comedy genius that is <a href="https://youtu.be/rZVjKlBCvhg">Eddie Izzard</a>, but, when you do, you take that opportunity and run with it …</p>
<p>So, turns out, loneliness is a nasty business. <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316">Loneliness and weak social connections</a> can see a reduction in lifespan that is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.</p>
<p>Goodness … I’ll have Lunch please.</p>
<p>Vivek Murthy, U.S. Surgeon General from 2014-2017, opens a recent <a href="https://hbr.org/cover-story/2017/09/work-and-the-loneliness-epidemic">HBR Big Idea</a> series exploring the loneliness epidemic, with a contribution titled ‘Connecting at Work’. Dr. Murthy rightly orients our attempts to address loneliness in the places we spend most of our time: with family, in school, and the workplace.</p>
<blockquote class="large">
<p>Reducing isolation at work is good for business - Vivek Murthy</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I am sure you can guess, we certainly think of Lunch Roulette as a way organizations can take concrete steps to help employees create and foster meaningful connection in the workplace. Which would in turn, we would hope, contribute towards wellbeing, and the development of protective factors to offset the effects loneliness and dissociation. We’ve long held the view that everyone working in an organization has a completely legitimate opportunity for (responsibility to?) engaging with everyone else and striking up a conversation accordingly - you’re all working towards the same mission, so why on earth not, eh?</p>
<p>Turns out it’s hard though. <a href="http://blog.lunchroulette.us/culture-eats-strategy-for-breakfast-and-no-ones-having-lunch">Firstly, for some, taking a break, away from the desk for a break, is just not the done thing</a>. This is mostly cultural, and can be addressed.</p>
<p><a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0037323">Experimental psychologists</a> have suggested that there are two additional factors in play - (1) We don’t want to break the ice, possibly from fear of rejection, or because we assume that the other doesn’t want to be disturbed, and (2) That if we do make a connection, we won’t be able to end the interaction. We avoid both of these concerns with Lunch Roulette: everyone opts in - so there’s no rejection because you’re all in it together, and you know it’s going to end as you’ve signed up for Lunch with a fixed time! For the individuals in the aforementioned study that were able to get past those barriers, there were uniformly positive benefits realised.</p>
<p>Wanting to engage with others, and being open to others engaging with you, seems to be critical to maintaining a sense of wellbeing that could potentially help mitigate the effects of loneliness, a vitally important skill as we age into our careers and through our professional lives. We won’t just ‘end up lonely’, we’ll have made choices, the ramifications of which won’t be fully realised until much later. <a href="https://qz.com/1048847/people-in-rich-countries-are-dying-of-loneliness-an-effect-on-par-with-obesity/">There’s a real opportunity (responsibility) to begin thinking about retirement, and the care of our future selves, not just financially, but socially</a>. Perhaps a simple, but intentional, lunch with a colleague is a way to do just that. If that’s too heavy a lift, why not just try a simple <a href="http://www.oprah.com/health/just-say-hello-video">‘Just Say Hello’</a>?</p>
<p>Thanks for listening,</p>
<p>DT</p>
tag:blog.lunchroulette.us,2014:Post/bringing-a-knife-to-a-gun-fight2017-10-17T07:23:54-07:002017-10-17T07:23:54-07:00Bringing a gun to a knife fight<p>We’ve been away two years, and that’s the headline we decide to rock up with?</p>
<p>Oh dear.</p>
<p>So much has happened in the last two years that it’s just not practical to go into any of it in any detail, needless to say Lunch Roulette continues to grow, and we continue to be fascinated by the conditions that can help people come together in the service of something bigger than themselves.</p>
<p>What prompted us to break out of our blogging stupor I hear you grunt? Follow along Dear Reader, follow along …</p>
<blockquote class="large">
<p>“Dear Lunch Roulette! Amazing service, just heard about you at a conference, excited to try you out, …”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We receive a lot of these notes on any given week and let me say right off the bat, we love them. It’s super nice receiving a little unbidden missive from someone who is excited you might be able to help them. Let’s read on.</p>
<blockquote class="large">
<p>“… we’re a team of 25 people … ”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Oh no.</p>
<p>There it is.</p>
<p>It’s just not going to work.</p>
<p>You start to tell me about how fast you’re growing, or that you’re the number one maker of something in the sector you compete in, but we’re afraid we already know. It’s not going to work at all and it’s not you. It’s us.</p>
<p>Let me explain.</p>
<p>Our solution is most useful for larger organizations who are looking to make cross-functional collaboration a part of their DNA through repeated practice of ‘engineered randomness’. As a rule of thumb, if you have fewer than 50 people, and you’d like them to meet less than a handful of times, all you need is a spreadsheet, and someone to help code some exclusion rules.</p>
<p>As you know, we’re <a href="http://blog.lunchroulette.us/coordination">scrupled</a>, so we’re not going to try and up-sell you on this. We’ve given this advice so many times, it felt like a blog was in order. Bringing us full circle. So, if you’re a smaller organization here’s some helpful pointers from your supporters at Lunch Roulette:</p>
<ol>
<li>Before you do anything, get some senior leaders to support the activity. Have them make it clear why getting to know people you don’t already is crucial for innovation and a healthy company culture. Have them also make it clear that it’s a muscle to build and flex, and not a one-and-done sort of activity. If you’re building a company with curious people, this won’t even need to be said (although it’s good to reaffirm if it’s how you want people to behave), and if you’re not building a company with curious people, you probably have bigger problems, so I’d stop reading this and get on with thinking about that …</li>
<li>Set some organizational intention behind #1. Meeting people, even if you’re curious, is weird. It shouldn’t be, but it is. You can lift that burden a little by setting it up so that everyone’s ‘experiencing the weird’ together - then it’s less weird, ‘cos everyone’s doing it …</li>
<li>The bookkeeping is the easiest bit. If you’ve gotten #1 and #2 under control, use your email system and a ledger of sorts to keep track of the trajectories people are on.</li>
</ol>
<p>Obviously, if you’re more than 50 people this’ll quickly become a massive nightmare logistically - hence Lunch Roulette, but before that, the above should stand you in good stead.</p>
<p>As always, thanks for listening, </p>
<p>DT</p>
tag:blog.lunchroulette.us,2014:Post/we-can-get-you-past-no-probably2015-07-29T06:48:28-07:002015-07-29T06:48:28-07:00We can get you past no ... Probably.<p>A wonderful Daily Shout from New Yorker contributor <a href="https://twitter.com/halliecantor">Hallie Cantor</a> caught my eye last week: <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/everything-i-am-afraid-might-happen-if-i-ask-new-acquaintances-to-get-coffee">“Everything I Am Afraid Might Happen If I Ask New Acquaintances to Get Coffee”</a>. </p>
<p>Thankfully, processes like Lunch Roulette can help. Organizations that use our platform have made the act of opting into random lunch meetings super easy … so we can get you past the first two hurdles right off the bat:</p>
<ol>
<li>They will say no.</li>
<li>They will say no and laugh at me for not having enough existing friends to get coffee with</li>
</ol>
<p>My favourite, and probably the thing I am most afraid of when talking to any new person is #16, “They’ll want to talk about CrossFit.” That, unfortunately, Lunch Roulette cannot help with.</p>
<p>In other news, a Vox article that caught my eye last week reminded me of an earlier Lunch Roulette blog posting <a href="http://blog.lunchroulette.us/culture-eats-strategy-for-breakfast-and-no-ones-having-lunch">bemoaning the fact that people pooh-pooh lunch</a>. After a decade in Switzerland the authour of <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/8974435/switzerland-work-life-balance">this piece</a> realised that there’s something a little odd about that, and decided to share. Have a read, it’s an interesting cultural reflection.</p>
<p>Finally, if you’ve 20 some minutes to spare, have a watch of our friend <a href="https://twitter.com/greg_lindsay">Greg Lindsay</a> as he describes more of his recent thinking on <a href="https://vimeo.com/134493744">‘Engineering Serendipity’</a>.</p>
<p>As the regular reader of these scribblings you’ll be interested to note that Mr. Lindsay is now talking about unknown knowns … a more realistic position, we felt, that we shared with Mr. Lindsay earlier this year. As you may recall (lol), we highlighted our thinking through talking about <a href="http://blog.lunchroulette.us/randomness-serendipity-bounded-rationality-and-light-cones">light cones and relativity</a>. So, apparently that is a thing that can work. </p>
<p>Physics #FTW.</p>
<p>Thanks for listening,</p>
<p>DT</p>
tag:blog.lunchroulette.us,2014:Post/deep-learning-and-systemic-insight2015-06-08T08:35:53-07:002015-06-08T08:35:53-07:00Deep Learning and Systemic Insight<p><a href="http://goo.gl/HEkVku">A number of months ago</a>, I staked the following claim:</p>
<p><strong>Through a combination of thoughtful physical space planning coupled with elements of rich mobile, network, and sensor data we can engineer the randomness of human interaction, in the hope of enriching for serendipitous outcomes. Such outcomes will be driven by engaged actors contextualizing previously unknown but knowable information/data/knowledge.</strong></p>
<p>There’s an emerging community of thinkers/doers exploring the intersection of data collection, modeling, and people analytics - in the service of engineering randomness. In the context of ‘work’, this paragraph represented the best synthesis of my noodling at that time on the topic.</p>
<p>Wait, why is work in single quotation marks? </p>
<p>When I talk about ‘work’, I typically refer to actors engaged in activities that contribute towards something that is bigger than any one of them. Interestingly this is inclusive of profit and non-profit ‘work’ … and it’s also inclusive of, perhaps, civic engagement.</p>
<p>Now, hold that thought for a moment, while we turn to Deep Learning …</p>
<p>Earlier this year, some researchers from <a href="http://deepmind.com/">Google DeepMind</a>, published some research in Nature which demonstrated <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/full/nature14236.html#author-information">‘Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning’</a>. In short, a deep learning architecture was fed images from classic Atari games. In addition the architecture was fed the game score at that time. In general, as the number of learning iterations is increased, the architecture determines ever-increasingly optimal strategies for increasing the game score.</p>
<p>For example, in Breakout, the ‘machine’ learns the ‘shimmy’ (the strategy of applying a little noise to position of the paddle), before figuring out that popping the ball over the back of the wall is a quick way to get rid of a lot of blocks, and increase your score. A mind-blowing, accessible, and visual introduction to this research can be found <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqXKQf2BOSE">here</a>.</p>
<p>Think about this for a moment. An algorithmic infrastructure, given minimal input, subsequently determines the underlying rules of a system - and then learns to navigate that system with a view to increasing an objective function.</p>
<p>Now, hold <strong>that</strong> for a moment while we turn to distributed computing …</p>
<p>With services like Amazon Web Services we have unprecedented compute power available to us, but it’s actually really difficult to write software that works optimally across hundreds-of-thousands/millions of machines. Adding compute power works when the underlying problems are separable, or embarrassingly parallel, but less so for problems that are intractably complex - you know, like social systems. </p>
<p>Interestingly, companies like [Improbable](<a href="http://www.improbable.io">www.improbable.io</a>) are exploring exactly such architectures - with a view to <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/04/new-tool-make-easy-build-dynamic-virtual-worlds/">simulating complex social problems</a>. Improbable CEO <a href="https://twitter.com/HermanNarula">Herman Narula</a> explores this in a recent <a href="http://a16z.com/2015/06/04/distributed-computing-simulations/">a16z podcast</a> and alludes to the potential power of enriching simulated worlds with sensor and Internet of Things-enabled devices … </p>
<p>Now, let’s bring it all together …</p>
<p>What if we:</p>
<ol>
<li>Find a space to explore (space could mean workplace, city etc.) </li>
<li>Create a sensor rich data abstraction of the workings of the space </li>
<li>Build a simulation of the space, enriched by the rich sensor data </li>
</ol>
<p>Such a simulated environment might be a real boon to exploring cause/effect in a way that mirrored the true complexity of the social nature of the problem(s) faced in spaces containing people.</p>
<p>Now, imagine the following (and I admit this is all tenuously sci-fi stuff …): what if those simulations were fed into a deep learning architecture? Could a machine then ‘learn’ the unwritten rules for how people navigate the underlying space? (I fully appreciate that the generation of the simulation data is an additional unnecessary step - this is perhaps most useful when the simulation is exploring the effect of an as-yet unimplemented intervention - prospective questions might explore whether ‘the rules’ changed in (un)expected ways).</p>
<p>Such algorithmically generated insights could be amazingly powerful tools for objectively exploring the spaces that contain our interactions - and, most excitingly, all of the pieces needed are currently available, or in active development. It’s an exciting time to be thinking about people analytics.</p>
<p>Thanks for listening,</p>
<p>DT</p>
tag:blog.lunchroulette.us,2014:Post/but-you-cant-please-all-the-people-all-the-time2015-05-29T07:37:30-07:002015-05-29T07:37:30-07:00"But you can't please all the people all the time"<p>I’m currently reading <a href="http://www.jonronson.com/">Jon Ronson</a>‘s most recent book, <a href="http://www.jonronson.com/shame.html">So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed</a>. My title from today’s post made me think of Chapter Two and his description of everything that went down with an author who’d made up some song lyrics.</p>
<p>I’m going to come clean. The lyric above is not from Mr. Marley - I changed 'fool’ to ‘please’. There, I said it … Phew, weight loaded.</p>
<p>What am I going on about I hear you toot? I don’t write for weeks, and then all of a sudden I start talking about plagiarism. What’s up with that?</p>
<p>Let me elaborate dear reader.</p>
<p>I attended Day One of <a href="https://www.conference-board.org/conferences/conferencedetail.cfm?conferenceid=2731">The Conference Board’s Digital Workplace Seminar</a> event yesterday. It was a good time, and I enjoyed speaking about data and change (<a href="http://bit.ly/1ACg0hd">slides can be found here</a>).</p>
<p>The topic of Employee Engagement came up a number of times, and was mentioned very early. As my one regular reader knows this is a <a href="http://blog.lunchroulette.us/employee-engagement-black-holes-and-time-warps">favorite topic of mine</a>. </p>
<p>As you may know, ‘engagement’ levels are lower than leadership within organizations would like. When measured, on average, you can expect about 30-40% of your organization to be <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/181289/majority-employees-not-engaged-despite-gains-2014.aspx">‘engaged’</a>. This big annual reveal seemingly sends ‘leaders’ into paroxysm’s of angsty hand-wringing. <a href="http://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/human-capital/articles/employee-engagement-culture-human-capital-trends-2015.html">What to do, what to do?</a></p>
<p>The question I asked yesterday as we began to go through this again was simply Why? Why are we so upset that only 30-40% of our colleagues are ‘engaged’? If you think about work as a rational service-based contract between employer and employee, unless ‘turning up engaged’ is something you’re compensating me for (and have previously clearly articulated as something you are expecting from me), why are you then beating yourself up that more people are <strong>not</strong> doing the seemingly irrational thing of turning up ‘engaged’? </p>
<p>Another way to look at this is to congratulate yourself that you’ve got a 60-70% rational workforce all of whom are (hopefully somewhat) focused on doing what you paid them to do.</p>
<p>I don’t think we really care about ‘engagement’ at all. I think this has become a proxy catch-all term that poorly captures some of the things we expect to be useful in the workplace but haven’t developed a sophisticated enough way of thinking about, measuring, or operationalizing at scale (I say this without having done any real research. Feel free to correct me on this as I expect there are some amazing organizations doing awesomesauce stuff on this, and I’d love to learn more).</p>
<p>So, my advice? If we are going to continue to measure this stuff – and we will – can we stop starting at 100 and working our way down? Can we stop beating ourselves up for every missed percentage point of the employee base that’s not ‘engaged’? Why don’t we start from 0 and thoroughly enjoy those wonderful colleagues who are doing the irrational and turning up ‘engaged’.</p>
<p>Thanks for listening,</p>
<p>DT</p>
<p>PS. As I write this, I wonder if I’m going to hear more about this topic next week as I learn about ‘[The Happiness Industry]’(<a href="http://www.versobooks.com/events/1118-the-happiness-industry-book-discussion-with-will-davies-greg-lindsay-and-melissa-aronczyk">http://www.versobooks.com/events/1118-the-happiness-industry-book-discussion-with-will-davies-greg-lindsay-and-melissa-aronczyk</a>)</p>
tag:blog.lunchroulette.us,2014:Post/coordination2015-03-27T05:55:09-07:002015-03-27T05:55:09-07:00Coordination by proxy<p>So, this happened earlier this week:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/odguru">@odguru</a> Coordination of knowledge within a system is, I believe, a Wicked Problem. As such it has no solution, just strategies for coping.</p>— David Thompson (@dcthmpsn) <a href="https://twitter.com/dcthmpsn/status/580486361905541120">March 24, 2015</a>
</blockquote>
<p>Seems like a good question, right? Why <strong>are</strong> organizations taking so long to figure out effective knowledge collaboration? As my reply implies I think that the fundamental issue of knowledge {management, coordination, collaboration} is ‘wicked’ at it’s core. Here’s more on what I mean by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem">wicked</a>. </p>
<p>One contributing factor to how this problem exhibits itself, and most likely a factor that ensures that this problem persists, is that of scale. Which got me to wondering if anyone has looked at the tension of exploration vs. exploitation as a function of organizational size? A guess might be that at some point an organization becomes large enough that the cost of exploring and discovering ‘who is working on your problem’ is outweighed by simply working on your problem directly.</p>
<p>We have some experience with this here at Lunch Roulette. An email comes through to the info email account:</p>
<p>“Hello, I work at Company X in Division Y and I think this would be a fabulous tool for fostering collaboration across both my and other divisions within my Company. Can you help? Many thanks, John”</p>
<p>Weeks later:</p>
<p>“Hello, I work at Company X in Division Z and I think this would be a fabulous tool for fostering collaboration across both my and other divisions within my Company. Can you help? Many thanks, Jane”</p>
<p>What do we do?</p>
<p>“Dear Jane, Thank you for your note of inquiry! You are right, Lunch Roulette is a fabulous tool for fostering collaboration across divisions within a Company. We can most certainly help. The first stop is for you to speak to John in Division Y. We’re working with him, and he had the same idea as you. This might mean you’re facing the same kinds of problems, and it might make sense to think about them together, with us. Looking forward to working with you, Lunch Roulette”</p>
<p>I would imagine this happens a lot - especially for larger vendors and providers of external services. Coordination through a third-party might seem odd, but it’s really a process of ‘problem-based abstraction’, which some of our customers have actually found quite useful. I guess it’s a value-add of working with us!</p>
<p>Thanks for listening,</p>
<p>DT</p>
tag:blog.lunchroulette.us,2014:Post/culture-eats-strategy-for-breakfast-and-no-ones-having-lunch2015-03-09T09:13:18-07:002015-03-09T09:13:18-07:00Culture eats strategy for breakfast and no one is having lunch ...<p>Some people attribute the quote connecting culture and breakfast to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker">Peter Drucker</a>. <a href="http://www.quora.com/Did-Peter-Drucker-actually-say-culture-eats-strategy-for-breakfast-and-if-so-where-when">Others do not</a>.</p>
<p>What everyone seems to agree upon, irrespective of where it originated from, is that ‘the culture’ of an organization is going to determine how much ‘different’ you can ultimately drive.</p>
<p>Which brings me neatly to today’s post.</p>
<p>Lunch Roulette - the awesome-web-based-engineered-randomness-solution - is only useful if it’s used. It’s <strong>only</strong> useful if you have a culture that lunch (or a scheduled break of some kind) is an expected part of the day. Turns out, especially in the US, this isn’t always a guarantee.</p>
<p>This was nicely explored in a recent piece posted on ‘<a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/03/05/390726886/were-not-taking-enough-lunch-breaks-why-thats-bad-for-business">The Salt</a>’ at NPR. Most folks, do not lunch away from their desks.</p>
<p>How bonkers is that? Surrounded by people working at the same company, on stuff that somehow connects in the service of the bigger picture, and no one wants to have lunch and talk about it …</p>
<p>All this, despite exhortations from innovation ‘gurus’, human resources and networking professionals regarding the power of finding someone new to talk to. Don’t believe me? Here’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_Hoffman">Reid Hoffmann</a> on the importance of ‘<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/reidhoffman/network-intelligence-your-company-cant-thrive-without-it">Network Intelligence</a>’. To borrow a nice quote from slide 27:</p>
<p>“When your employees share what they learn from the people in their network (about technologies, competition, talent), they help you solve key business challenges faster.”</p>
<p>Simple as that.</p>
<p>Make it as easy as possible for your employees to connect - have a think about setting up a <a href="http://lunchroulette.us/contact.html">Lunch Roulette instance</a>; we’ll also work with you to create a cultural norm around taking a break and letting the mind wander in productive and beneficial ways. At least we’ll try, <a href="http://goo.gl/e62OsF">we both know there are no guarantees</a>.</p>
<p>Thanks for listening,</p>
<p>DT</p>
tag:blog.lunchroulette.us,2014:Post/clowns-jokers-rocks-and-hardplaces2015-02-27T05:05:20-08:002015-02-27T05:05:20-08:00Clowns, Jokers, Rocks, and Hard Places<p>If you haven’t yet, take some time to have a read of <a href="http://twitter.com/AimeeGroth">Aimee Groth’s</a> <a href="http://qz.com/317918/holacracy-at-zappos-its-either-the-future-of-management-or-a-social-experiment-gone-awry/">wonderful article</a> on the self-organizing management schema <a href="http://holacracy.org/">‘The Holocracy’</a>.</p>
<p>To undertake a whole scale transformation of how an organization works - how decisions are made, and how power is distributed - is a complex and audacious task. But, it also struck me as somewhat simplistic at the same time.</p>
<p>What do I mean by this, I hear you toot? </p>
<p>What if we view the self-organizing model as the complement, the diametric opposite, of a completely designed model? Either we let the system decide, or we decide for the system. We manage to the extremes. Because, at the extremes we, have more clarity and that’s really all we want ever - is clarity, and as much as you can give us thanks very much.</p>
<p>My initial reaction to Ms. Groth’s piece I tweeted about:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<p>Either/or is easy. It’s both/and that’s hard, and where the magic lives.</p>— David Thompson (@dcthmpsn) <a href="https://twitter.com/dcthmpsn/status/568186521410506752">February 18, 2015</a>
</blockquote>
<p>I suspect it could be worse to just appeal to structures on the extremes - because sometimes you’ll need a blend of both approaches, and by not having them, you’ll be leaving value on the table. Being able to hold different patterns of work together long enough, in as stable and productive way as possible, is vital. Acknowledging this, and subsequently balancing it, are most likely two of the most challenging obstacles facing any organization, in any industry.</p>
<p>Thanks for listening,</p>
<p>DT</p>
tag:blog.lunchroulette.us,2014:Post/the-other-half-of-working-out-loud-eyes-wide-open-brain-switched-on2015-02-18T11:26:50-08:002015-02-18T11:26:50-08:00The other half of Working out Loud: Eyes Wide Open, Brain Switched On<p>In the Epilogue of <a href="http://www.noreena.com/">Noreena Hertz’s</a> wonderful book ‘<a href="http://ads.harpercollins.com/boba?isbn=9780062268631">Eyes Wide Open</a>’, she exhorts us to keep our ‘eyes wide open and our brains switched on’. </p>
<p>Prof. Hertz’s book is all about navigating complexity and making decisions with incomplete information. Her advice, admittedly obvious, is quickly ignored - so her reminder (any reminder really) is a good one. I also think it’s an important piece of ‘the puzzle’ we’re exploring here, so is the focus of my post this week.</p>
<p>But first, let me introduce the concept of ‘Working Out Loud’ (WOL). Coined by <a href="http://thebryceswrite.com/2010/11/29/when-will-we-work-out-loud-soon/">Bryce Williams in 2010</a>, WOL is the narration of observable work using social channels (typically digital in nature). The concept has been driven by <a href="https://twitter.com/johnstepper">John Stepper</a>, with John leading the way in <a href="http://workingoutloud.com/">showing folks how to do this</a>. </p>
<p>The Working Out Loud concept made it onto a list yesterday, authored by <a href="https://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe">Dion Hinchcliffe</a>, wherein Mr. Hinchcliffe described ‘<a href="http://dionhinchcliffe.com/2015/02/17/what-are-the-required-skills-for-todays-digital-workforce/">The required skills for today’s digital workforce</a>’. As Mr. Hinchcliffe describes it: “Working out loud allows one to let the network do the work and breaks down the silos that have rebuilt up with virtual workplaces and today’s far-flung multinational teams.” </p>
<p>Jolly good.</p>
<p>But, only half of the puzzle.</p>
<p>Let’s take the concept of ‘Working Out Loud’ to it’s limit. What happens when everyone’s doing it? All ‘work’ happening within an organization would be captured, on a fully searchable and persistent platform. That is probably a good thing, of course, but to be sure it’s the easier side of the equation. The harder question, is Now What … ?</p>
<p>To continue the <a href="http://goo.gl/dcQS1Y">Ghostbusters theme</a> … <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYjFKsJjCP0">Come Here Francine</a>.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://goo.gl/HEkVku">couple of months back</a>, I made the following observation:</p>
<p>“Through a combination of thoughtful physical space planning coupled with elements of rich mobile, network, and sensor data we can engineer the randomness of human interaction, in the hope of enriching for serendipitous outcomes. Such outcomes will be driven by engaged actors contextualizing previously unknown but knowable information/data/knowledge.”</p>
<p>See what crept in there: ‘ … engaged actors contextualizing previously unknown but knowable information/data/knowledge.’</p>
<p>If you don’t have curious people, ‘engaged actors’, looking to solve problems to benefit their organization, having all the data, in one place, and searchable, isn’t going to get you where you need to go.</p>
<p>Working Out Loud is an important piece of the puzzle - but having people in an organization looking to explore what you’re curating, in their context, in the service of ‘the mission’ is the missing piece for me.</p>
<p>The biggest omission on that list? Curiosity. An Essential Workplace Skill.</p>
<p>Thanks for listening,</p>
<p>DT </p>
tag:blog.lunchroulette.us,2014:Post/tell-him-about-the-twinkie2015-02-06T07:39:41-08:002015-02-06T07:39:41-08:00Tell him about the twinkie<p>There’s always room on a Friday for <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/quotes">Ghostbusters quotes</a>. Am I right?</p>
<p>Never mind. Don’t answer that.</p>
<p>For those of you that remember, ‘the twinkie’ referred to above, was being used to describe the magnitude of the paranormal problem the Ghostbusters were about to find themselves in. It was a sugary prop for a discussion about measurement.</p>
<p>Which is exactly this week’s topic.</p>
<p>As you, my frequent reader knows, we’re all about curating conditions to enrich for the the likelihood of serendipitous outcomes. That’s really what Lunch Roulette-like services are all about.</p>
<p>While fingers-crossed and hoping is a good start, we should strive for measurement in this which, as I’ve previously <a href="http://goo.gl/cKtEHh">mentioned</a>, is hard.</p>
<p>Earlier this week I revisited this topic and began to noodle the following. I’m offering this more of a hypothesis at the moment, but I think we’re onto something.</p>
<p>What if emergent organizational properties (e.g. culture, innovation, engagement) require a method of measurement that is as emergent as the property that is being measured? For some recent thoughts on emergence, have a look at this <a href="http://goo.gl/e62OsF">post</a>.</p>
<p>What might this mean? Well, for one, it would provide a rationale behind why we don’t currently do it. It might be as expensive (both from a time and resource perspective) as setting and preserving the conditions to enable the emergence in the first place.</p>
<p>What might such an emergent measurement scheme look like? I’d imagine, some sort of oral history and evaluation. As my friend [Alexa Beavers[(<a href="http://www.twitter.com/awbeavers">http://www.twitter.com/awbeavers</a>) has suggested, something like the <a href="http://mande.co.uk/special-issues/most-significant-change-msc/">Most Significant Change</a> might be appropriate. This methodology is used within the social sector to measure impact - itself a higher order/emergent property of an intervention.</p>
<p>Gosh, we’ve come quite a long way from that twinkie, eh?</p>
<p>Thanks for listening,</p>
<p>DT</p>